strong,
and, I said before, by nature a very courageous boy. There came into
his head, somehow or other, a proverb that his nurse had taught him--the
people of Nomansland were very fond of proverbs:

"For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy, or there's none;
If there is one, try to find it--
If there isn't, never mind it."

"I wonder is there a remedy now, and could I find it?" cried the Prince,
jumping up and looking out of the window.

No help there. He only saw the broad, bleak, sunshiny plain--that is, at
first. But by and by, in the circle of mud that surrounded the base of
the tower, he perceived distinctly the marks of a horse's feet, and just
in the spot where the deaf-mute was accustomed to tie up his great black
charger, while he himself ascended, there lay the remains of a bundle of
hay and a feed of corn.

"Yes, that's it. He has come and gone, taking nurse away with him. Poor
nurse! how glad she would be to go!"

That was Prince Dolor's first thought. His second--wasn't it
natural?--was a passionate indignation at her cruelty--at the cruelty
of all the world toward him, a poor little helpless boy. Then he
determined, forsaken as he was, to try and hold on to the last, and not
to die as long as he could possibly help it.

Anyhow, it would be easier to die here than out in the world, among the
terrible doings which he had just beheld--from the midst of which, it
suddenly struck him, the deaf-mute had come, contriving somehow to make
the nurse understand that the king was dead, and she need have no fear
in going back to the capital, where there was a grand revolution, and
everything turned upside down. So, of course, she had gone. "I hope
she'll enjoy it, miserable woman--if they don't cut off her head too."

And then a kind of remorse smote him for feeling so bitterly toward her,
after all the years she had taken care of him--grudgingly, perhaps, and
coldly; still she had taken care of him, and that even to the last: for,
as I have said, all his four rooms were as tidy as possible, and his
meals laid out, that he might have no more trouble than could be helped.

"Possibly she did not mean to be cruel. I won't judge her," said he. And
afterward he was very glad that he had so determined.

For the second time he tried to dress himself, and then to do everything
he could for himself--even to sweeping up the hearth and putting on
more coals. "It's a funny thing for a prince t